“We can’t behave like people in novels, though, can we?”
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.
“The Gauge of Dissonance,” by Aaron Fagan uses the line as an epigraph. The title gets us started on a high note, and "rises to eloquence," provokes thought:
We can, but there is no one there to explain us to ourselves
Or others—the tidy or perfectly untidy inner lives of strangers
Designed for us to love or not love but love then unlove
And then love again by story’s end. And no one is so perfectly
Self-aware as those imagined in all those parallel linear lines
Of prose like striped prison uniforms now set free in verse
No matter how unskillful their behavior might’ve been those
Years ago, beneath a balcony in Paris, and the decision to leave.
The third and fourth lines struck me as very Virginia Woolf-esque. Well done.
Millicent Caliban's poem, “Death Sentence” offers us another way in to Wharton's sentiment:
We can’t behave like people in novels.
We haven’t got the time, the wit, the grace.
We are bored, overworked, exhausted,
or plunged so deep in our personal swamps,
we cannot rise to the necessary
insight, irony, or self-reflection.We slither around in the opaque mud:
reptilian, repulsive, repugnant,
lacking an author to prompt our passions,
detonate desire. We can see no plot,
no climax, no redeeming denouement.
Alas! Condemned to remain post-modern.
And finally, Patricia Wallace’s “The Window,” a sonnet, with a terrific opening, and a lovely turn:
Coming not out of nowhere, like the cold October wind
down from the mountains, the ten-year window arrives,
revising the scope of binoculars from far
to near, and we’re staring it right in the faces
of our suddenly ghostly children. We’re searching for
a story that leads to a different ending, magical
realism or a fable where polar bears regenerate
and glaciers like ice cubes refreeze, or at least
the old inhabitant trees hang on, their birdless limbs
whispering to one another. Now a blip on
the radar, we’re trying to invent new characters, better
than we are. But we can’t behave like people in novels,
can we? Jumping backward in time, heeding the warning
signs, giving the predictable conclusion the slip?
We also applaud Patricia Smith (whose poem begins with the Wharton epigraph, and then “I certainly hope not—” ), Louis Altman (whose phrase “a Dashiell Hammett evening” could launch a dozen poems), Donald LaBranche, Keith Barrett, and Elizabeth Solzburg for work of exceptional merit.
More poems on the American Scholar's page, along with the full post! And a new prompt next week~